by D V Wolfe
“I know,” Gabe said. “Bane, it was only one day. If she’s still acting this way tomorrow, I’ll help convince her to let you go hunt. Maybe if you promise to avoid the cannibals and hunt something else, she’ll be satisfied.”
I shook my head. “But if there’s a lead on the tribe, you know I have to....”
“Shhhh,” Gabe said. I looked up at him. He was smiling and shaking his head. “Don’t say it out loud. If you don’t say it, I can honestly tell Rosetta that I didn’t hear you planning on directly going against her wishes, and then she can’t beat me up for it.”
I snorted. “What are you afraid of? You could take Rosetta.”
Gabe slowly shook his head. “Nope, she’s wily. I’m pretty sure she’d kick my ass.” He stood up and offered me a hand. I took it and he pulled me up. “Come on. Let’s roll credits on this day in captivity.”
Later that night, I lay awake, staring at the living room ceiling in the dark and listening to Gabe and Noah saw logs around me. There was a nagging anxiety that had an invisible claw in my chest, dragging at me, trying to pull me towards the back door and out to Lucy, out to hunt. The grandfather clock in the front entryway was ticking and it wasn’t doing anything to help slow my heart rate.
“Close your eyes,” Gabe whispered beside me, making me jump. “Sorry,” he chuckled. I hadn’t even heard the interruption in his even breathing when he’d woken up. “Just close your eyes and think about something good. Something happy. Then just breathe.”
“What is that, something the monks at the Order taught you?” I whispered.
“No,” Gabe said. “Something my mom would tell me when I had a bad dream and couldn’t get back to sleep. Just humor me. Try it.”
I sighed and closed my eyes.
“Just breathe,” Gabe whispered.
I blamed his proximity. That had to be the reason that the ‘good and happy’ thing that sprang into my head was a sofa bed with Looney Tunes blaring in the background. Whiskery kisses on bare skin, the smell of whiskey, and Cap’n Crunch…
Then there was a scream. The feeling of a boot kicking me in the solar plexus, knocking the air out of me. A hand, dragging me up by a sore shoulder. My arm was dislocated, numb, and hanging at an awkward angle down by my side. The shirt I was wearing was restricting and I reached my good hand up, loosening my tie. My vision was blurred. I touched my face, feeling my swollen eyes and lips, sore and crusted over from the beating I’d taken that day. There was noise. Laughter? Screaming? Both? Somewhere nearby. The hand on my shoulder jerked me to a stop and blurred movement in front of me registered as a door being opened. I felt another hand at my jacket, pushing it aside, grabbing my shirt and lifting it. The feel of a serrated blade, trailing against my stomach.
“When do we get to partake of this one, Mastick?” A voice behind the knife asked.
“Not yet, brother. When the time comes, your blade will be the first to know.” This deep voice belonged to the hand, gripping my shoulder. I was shoved into the next room with such force, I banged my head on the wall. My legs were weak and I crumbled to the floor. Cold tile, under my hands. I reached out blindly, my sore mouth ached and I tasted blood again. I tongued the two holes where my missing teeth used to be. My good hand connected with the base of a sink and I wrapped my fingers over the basin and pulled myself up. I panted with the effort, doing my best to lock my knees and lean forward to keep from falling again. I rested my head against the smooth wall above the sink. I turned my face so that I could squint at my reflection in the mirror as it began to fog up from my short, hot breaths in the effort I was making to not pass out from the pain.
I bolted up off of Rosetta’s living room floor. “Festus!”
17
“He’s alive,” I said, gripping the kitchen table. “I saw him.”
Gabe sat beside me, one hand resting on the back of my chair and the other on the table, inches away from my hand. “Are you sure? I mean, could it just be a dream?”
I shook my head. “My imagination isn’t that creative. I was inside Festus. I was Festus. I could feel every injury and, from the feel of it, they’ve been raking him over the coals.”
“Why haven’t they just killed him?” Stacks asked, rubbing his eyes under his glasses. His hair was standing up at the back and his t-shirt was on backward as if he’d jerked it on in the dark and was lucky his head wasn’t coming out of a sleeve hole.
“One of the cannibals asked the one that was holding Festus that and he said that ‘the time hadn’t come yet’,” I said, closing my eyes, trying to remember.
“Good news for Festus, then,” Tags said, slumping into a chair across from me. He had one of Rosetta’s terry cloth robes pulled tight around him. It was too short for how tall Tags was and I was thankful he’d finally sat down, though I imagined Rosetta’s wooden kitchen chairs were probably cold.
“Not unless I can get him out of there before ‘the time does come’,” I said. I turned to Rosetta who was sitting in her chair at the end of the table, picking at the black ski cap on her head. “Rosetta, he’s still alive. I have to find him.”
“The ‘time’ they’re waiting for could be the full moon,” Tags said, looking at Rosetta. “On Friday.”
“Bane,” Rosetta said, ignoring Tags and focussing her gaze on me. “This sounds like a trap. Taggert is right. For whatever reason, they want you to come to them on the full moon. Who knows what kind of mind games they’re playing with you. It could be dream sending or manipulation.”
“Or it could be Festus reaching out for help,” I said, trying to push my chair back. Gabe held it in place and I turned to glare at him.
“Let’s say that you’re right and Festus did reach out to you, for the sake of argument,” Gabe said quickly, holding up a hand to silence Rosetta who had started to interrupt. Gabe turned back to look at me. “Even if it is Festus, reaching out for help, did you see anything in the dream that would tell you where he was being kept?”
I closed my eyes and thought. “Some kind of house. There was a room. He was on the floor and then, in...a bathroom.”
“Well, that should narrow it down,” Stacks muttered.
I wanted to be pissed at him, but I knew he was right. What did I know for sure? In my bones, I knew this wasn’t a trick. Festus was alive. I just had to get to him before they decided to kill him. And there was my problem. I had no idea how to get to him.
“That settles it,” Rosetta said. “Whatever this ‘vision’ is, doesn’t matter. There’s no way to find him if he’s alive and there’s no way for you to walk right into the trap if he’s not. So let’s all go back to bed. There’s nothing more we can do tonight.”
Chairs scraped around me and Gabe as everyone else got to their feet and started drifting back towards the stairs or the living room. Noah paused next to me.
“Maybe, if it is Festus, if you go to sleep again, you’ll be able to see more.” I nodded and he moved away, back down the hall.
“He’s alive,” I said to Gabe. “But for how long? I don’t know.” I turned to look at him. “What do you think cannibals would consider ‘the right time’ to be for killing a captive? You think it has something to do with the full moon? Everything I know about the tribe tells me that they like fast food. Get it, cook it, eat it. And sometimes the middle step is pretty abbreviated.”
“Well, I never heard of the H.A.N.D. tribe to stand on much of any kind of ceremony, but I know there are some cannibal tribes who still practice human sacrifice before eating their victims and a lot of those rites happen around moon cycles,” Gabe said.
“And they do have a new sheriff in town,” I said quickly, thinking of Mastick. If he believed in the moon cycle ritual thing and that’s what he was saving Festus for, then I still had two days before they’d sacrifice him.
“Bane…” Gabe said quietly.
“That’s two days away. I could probably get to him by then. I just need a heading,” I said, getting to my feet.
“Bane,” Gabe said again, reaching out and grabbing my hand before I could leave the table. “This could just be a trap, just like Rosetta said.”
I shook my head. “They will still kill and eat him, even if I don’t come. Gabe, I can’t just sit here, know that he’s alive, and do nothing to save him.”
Gabe’s face was tired under his bushy mustache and beard. He heaved himself out of his chair and moved over to the counter by the sink. He picked up my portable radio and brought it over to me. “Here, but if Rosetta asks, I didn’t encourage this.” I grinned at him and took the radio. “And you better keep the volume low.”
“And I’ll call Walter if something sounds promising,” I said.
Gabe nodded. “Again, you better keep it on the down-low from Rosetta or she’ll confiscate your phone too.” I’d thought of that earlier in the day when I’d wanted to call Walter. Rosetta had forbidden me and I hadn’t pushed the issue, afraid she would force me to give her my phone. I really didn’t want to be at odds with Rosetta, but I knew that she didn’t have the same view of Festus as I did.
“Now let’s try to get another hour or two of sleep before the sun comes up,” Gabe said. He wrapped a bear-sized arm around my shoulders and directed me back to the living room.
I flipped the radio on and turned the volume low when Noah started to stir. I laid on my side, facing away from Gabe and Noah, and listened with my face an inch away from it, straining to hear a report from Walter. I felt myself starting to fall asleep again and I was ok with that too. I reached out in my mind, fumbling in the dark. Where are you, Festus?
I needed to keep Rosetta in a good mood so that she’d be more inclined to let me go when something promising came on the radio. I’d brought up leaving again the next morning and it hadn’t gone so well.
By the time the other four wandered into the kitchen for breakfast, Rosetta and I had been having an unspoken war over who could make more noise with the pots and pans on their side of the kitchen. I was banging them around in the sink as I scrubbed at them, mercilessly, and Rosetta was clanging them off the range of her stove and the countertop beside her, each of us trying to top the other’s noise level.
“I can feel the healing happening in this room,” Stacks shouted over the noise. Simultaneously, Rosetta and I paused and shot Stacks a death glare.
“Holy shit,” I heard Noah breath in the silence. “I swear, for just a minute Stacks, I expected your face to melt off like one of those Nazis from that Indiana Jones movie.”
After that, all four of them sat down quietly at the table, and Rosetta slammed a pan of biscuits, a plate of waffles, and a pot of sausage gravy onto the table. She sat down and I kept scrubbing at the pots in the sink, clanging them every time Rosetta called to me to come sit down.
“I’m not done yet,” I yelled back at her, over the noise.
“That’s fine, Bane,” Rosetta finally yelled back. “You just keep scrubbing that pot. We’ll just finish our breakfast and have all the waffles without you.”
Now she was really playing dirty. I dropped the pan back into the sink, dried my hands on a towel, and sat down at the table.
“Wow,” Tags said, breaking the quiet. “Silence really is golden.”
“Then why don’t you practice it,” Rosetta muttered, forking a waffle onto her plate. She glared down the table at him. “Because ammo is silver.”
After breakfast, I decided to change tactics, so I smiled and helped clean up, and then I settled down on the back porch to fill shells with the radio on the table next to me. Stacks was in the living room reading, and Noah was doing something on Stacks’ laptop. Rosetta was thawing chicken for lunch and Tags was sitting at her table sorting through her herbs and spices from her potting shed. Gabe had rolled his bike into the backyard to rest on the concrete apron next to the back gate where it was level so he could give it a once over.
He paused before he set to work and looked at me. “Are you and Rosetta going to be ok?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
“Oh, we’re just peachy,” I said, accidentally splitting the plastic on a shell with the force I used to seal it.
“Oh good,” Gabe said. “Because that ‘battling banjos’ thing you and Rosetta were doing with the pots and pans is probably a nightly stage act in some low ring of Hell.” Gabe gave me a little half-smile and scratched the back of his neck. “Please, for the rest of us, can you two never do that again?”
“I won’t if she won’t,” I said.
Gabe sighed. “Well, then we’re doomed.” Gabe turned back to his bike and I turned on the radio next to me.
“Bane,” I heard Rosetta call to me through the screen door. “How are you doing on pills?”
“Starting to run low,” I said. “Would you be able to make some more for me?”
“Yep. As soon as Taggert is done sorting through and re-labeling, you can help me.”
“Thank you,” I called back. It was a little unnerving to be on such polite and distant terms with Rosetta. She’d been avoiding me and I’d learned her new tactic of not answering when she didn’t like a question I asked. I put a little more force behind the shell loader than I’d meant to as I pressed another shell. The red plastic went white at the edges where it had been bent too far and I sighed, pulling it out of the loader and setting it aside.
“Good Morning,” Walter’s voice came over the radio. “Two large storm fronts are moving over the midwest.” In the yard, Gabe paused and looked over at me. “This is a severe weather warning,” Walter continued. Gabe hurried over to the porch steps, wiping the grease off his hands with an oil rag. “A dark thunderhead is moving over Salvation, Missouri causing power outages, heavy rains, and hail. The second front is heading south and Sicily, Oklahoma can expect heavy winds of up to sixty miles an hour to hit late tonight and into tomorrow. The high winds will most likely cause property damage and power outages, heavy rains, and thunderstorms. Both fronts have the possibility of causing isolated tornadoes on Friday. If you’re traveling that direction, travel with care.”
I looked up at Gabe. “The tribe.”
Gabe looked torn. “Or something else entirely.”
“But tornadoes,” I said. “On Friday. If we are buying into Walter’s vision, one hundred percent…”
“Then those tornadoes also mean the end of you,” Rosetta growled, her back door banging open. “Turn that radio off and come inside.”
I shook my head. “No. This is important.”
“So is keeping you alive,” Rosetta snapped. “Now turn the damn thing off.”
The anger I’d been pushing down for the last two days was boiling up inside me. Rosetta’s hypocrisy with the cussing was the last straw. “No,” I said, standing up, facing her. I heard the scrape of chair legs on the floor in the kitchen and Tags coming up behind her.
“What’s going on?” Stacks called, coming into the kitchen. Rosetta shook her head and stomped out onto the porch. I figured out what she was about to do a few seconds before she reached it and I swiped the radio off the table and held it above my head where she couldn’t reach it.
“Bane!” Rosetta barked. “Give me that fucking radio.”
“No,” I said. “And just for the record, do you ever hear yourself? You yell at all of us for cussing but then, you cuss whenever you feel like it. Doesn’t something about that seem wrong to you?”
“I cuss to make a point,” Rosetta snapped. “You all cuss just to rebel.”
“Do you think that’s what this is?” I asked. “I’m just ‘rebelling’? Festus’ life is in danger. I’ve got to go find him.”